Marina Mabrey is at the free throw line at Coca-Cola Coliseum with 32 seconds on the clock. The Tempo trail by one. She has already scored 25 points on this floor in less than 40 minutes of regulation basketball. She makes the first free throw. Tie game. She makes the second. Toronto leads, 65-64. Two more points to put on her line. She finishes the night with 27.
That is the high point. The next thirty-two seconds are the rest of the story.
Shakira Austin gets fouled inside on Washington's possession. She makes both free throws. Tempo trail by one. Mabrey misses on the offensive end, her sixth miss of nine fourth-quarter shots. Austin gets fouled again. She makes both free throws. Mystics lead by three with eight seconds left. Toronto's last possession dies on a contested Laura Juskaite corner three out of a five-out look. Final: Washington 68, Toronto 65.
That is the basketball. Now the box score, which tells a brutal story about how much Mabrey carried.
Mabrey scored 27 of Toronto's 65 points. She shot 6 of 18 from the field, 3 of 9 from three, and a perfect 12 of 14 from the free throw line. The four-for-four from the stripe in the final four minutes is what makes the line possible. The 6-of-18 is what makes it necessary. Mabrey was the only Tempo player who could create offense reliably and she had to do it 18 times to get there. The franchise tag at $1.4 million is going to look like a bargain if she carries this team like that for 44 games.
Brittney Sykes scored the first basket in regular-season Tempo history, a mid-range pull-up early in the first quarter. The crowd lost its mind anyway. She finished with 14 points on 4-of-18 shooting, 0-of-5 from three, and 6-of-9 from the line. Sykes had a brutal shooting night and was still the second-leading scorer on the team. Half the team finished with two points or fewer. Toronto shot 27 percent from the field as a team. They lost by three.
Julie Allemand hit the first three-pointer in regular-season Tempo history late in the first quarter. The Belgian point guard played 30 minutes, scored three points, and committed zero turnovers. Three assists. She did not light up the box score. She also kept the offense organized while Mabrey took every shot in sight. That is what a savvy international point guard looks like in a game where her primary scorer is going one-on-one for thirty minutes.
The Mystics' frontcourt was the second story. Kiki Iriafen finished with 12 points and 16 rebounds on 5-of-9 shooting. Sixteen rebounds. In her second WNBA season, against an expansion team built around a Russian center who is in St. Petersburg right now. Shakira Austin added 18 points and 11 rebounds. Together those two played 56 minutes and combined for 30 points and 27 rebounds. Toronto got outrebounded 44-37 and gave up 16 second-chance points. Without Maria Kliundikova, the Tempo do not have a frontcourt anchor and it showed. Temi Fagbenle played 16 minutes and grabbed exactly one rebound. Isabelle Harrison did not play.
Sonia Citron was the third story and the one I will be writing about all season. She is in her second year as a Mystics wing. She scored 26 points on 9-of-12 shooting, including 3 of 6 from three. The 26 led all scorers in the building. She matched up with Sykes for most of the night and won the matchup decisively. The Mystics added Lauren Betts in the lottery and the rookie barely played (12 minutes, zero points). They did not need her. Citron and Iriafen and Austin were enough.
Kiki Rice played 18 minutes in her first regular-season WNBA game. She did not score. She also did not turn the ball over. That is roughly the right outcome for a rookie point guard in a one-possession game when Mabrey is taking every shot. Brondello did the right thing by playing her. The development reps matter more than the box score this month.
The crowd. I have written about Toronto Raptors crowds at the Air Canada Centre for fifteen years. This was different. Smaller, obviously. Younger, mostly. Almost entirely women and girls in the lower bowl, with families and small groups of teenage athletes who had clearly come together. The first time Mabrey was announced in the starting lineup, the noise registered higher than anything I have heard from a Raptors regular-season crowd in March. The roar after Sykes's first basket was the moment the building stopped being a Tempo home opener and started being a basketball game.
What this loss tells us. The Tempo are not built to win when Mabrey shoots 33 percent. They came within a possession of doing it anyway. The defensive identity Brondello has been building since training camp held a 26-point Citron night to 68 total points. The frontcourt depth issue is real and visible and not solvable on this roster. Three of those things can all be true.
The schedule gives them a break. Three days off before the next home game, Wednesday night against the Seattle Storm at Coca-Cola Coliseum. That is a lot of time for Brondello to install a play that is not Mabrey going one-on-one. Seattle just lost to Phoenix in their opener. They are missing Magbegor for another five weeks. That is the kind of game an expansion team in week one needs on the schedule. A winnable one, against a team without their best player, with three days to clean up the late-game execution that put Austin at the line twice in thirty seconds.
Pick up the Tempo Report on Wednesday morning for the read on what week one told us, and what we are watching for in game two. Until then: we lost. We were here. The building was. Mabrey scored 27. That is enough.
[ End Report ]